NYC Waitress Claims She Was Fired For Not Covering Dine-And-Dash Bill, Owner Denies She Even Worked There
Sometimes, front-of-house managers are dicks. Sometimes, they do things like schedule their waiters for two double shifts in a row, force them to work while sick, or freak out when their shoes are not the appropriate shade of black (come on, Matt, they’re a distressed black, not grey, and I’m not going home to change them). We’ve never heard of a manager who fired someone and then denied they ever worked there, though, like a manager at NYC’s famous Pig and Whistle did, however.
This is the tale of Suzanne Parratt, a waitress who claims she was fired after she refused to pay the bill, out of her own earning, for a party of three who dine-and-dashed. According to her interview with Gothamist, her manager, Eugene Wilson, told her that if she didn’t pay the bill, he’d take it out of her coworker’s pay. “I believe he said this because it was relayed to him that I was not intending to pay the tab, and he wanted to guilt me into it or he’d make my coworkers pay for it,” she speculated, adding:
“It was repeatedly drilled into our minds that if a customer were to ever dash on a check, that the server is responsible for the tab. This is not uncommon in the restaurant industry, but in my many years of experience I’ve never actually seen it practiced. We were also told that if a credit card slip was unsigned, we would be held responsible for that as well, though I never was held responsible for that.”
After she refused and was summarily fired, she brought her story to Reddit and Gothamist, as well as filed a report with the Division of Labor Standards. (Spoiler alert: making your employees pay for any losses sustained to your business is super duper illegal.) But the best part is this part:
We called Pig N Whistle for comment and spoke to Wilson, who said he was “not too sure” what we were talking about. He said he’d “have to look into” whether anyone named Suzanne did or had worked there, but did deny that anyone had been fired on Tuesday. Multiple follow-up calls were ignored by Wilson.
If only one could automatically forget people one hates/have fired, the world would be a happier place, Matt.
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